Amid those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Translated

Among the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a solitary sight remained with me: a volume I had translated from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was torn and stained, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City Under Assault

Two days prior, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent detonations. The internet was totally severed. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to move words across languages, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: sudden fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, declining to let silence and dust have the final say.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture spread digitally of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into art, loss into poetry, grief into quest.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, practice, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the image. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to be silenced.